Ian David Stafford Beer

Freshmen Ian Beer, my brother and I arrived at Ellesmere College for the first time at the start of the new academic year in 1961. I, perhaps Peter, too, had been apprehensive since Ellesmere had the reputation of being a ‘tough’, indeed a ‘flogging’ school, but Pa was determined that we follow him. Yes, Ian David Stafford Beer… who could forget such ringing, quadripetal nomenclature after its frequent repetition during his installation in chapel in that first Michælmas term. The ceremony was insinuatingly impressive for a twelve-year-old farmer’s son open to the splendours of its Gothic-revival Anglo-Catholic ritual, a tradition bequeathed by our founder, Nathaniel Woodard, and faithfully maintained. The rite was performed by the mitred Provost, and the Eucharist concelebrated by the refined, ascetic, revered and too-soon-to-be-lamented Skene Catling.

IDSB – he often went by his initials as did all common-room members – introduced a catalogue of reforms. One of them was a declaration that he did not wish beating to be the corrective choice of automatic resort. In actuality, the phrase which I remember was that it should not be the ‘punishment of last resort’ which led one wag to ask whether the new headmaster proposed to introduce thumbscrews. Well, I was flogged but twice, on both occasions somewhat unjustly and that due to the resisting residual tendencies of the ancien régime, but I feel that I should be grateful to IDSB that it happened so infrequently, and that thus I did not develop the English public school product’s taste for it.

   Another reform from which we benefited was his decision that masters (what a fine mot compared with that slumdog word ‘teacher’) should retire at sixty. Indeed, it was considered an outrage by some of his common-room, the end of a freehold hitherto guaranteed to the age of sixty-five. Evans-Prosser, Beer's predecessor, had employed many bachelors of whom duty could be demanded ‘24-7’, as, horribile dictu, the modern vernacular puts it. IDSB brought in a new generation of competent and ambitious young men. For the most part, and, one supposes, when the field of applicants allowed, he had an unerring eye for ability, energy and normality. We had to be grateful to him for having employed inspiring and dedicated men such as Hony, Scorer, Beadles, Mayes, Mel Jones and Foster. Although I went on to Oxford to read History under tutors possessed of very great names, Mel Jones was one of the most stimulating history instructors under whose purview I ever fell. I base some of my own teaching upon his style. Ian Beer had picked and appointed him, and those several others.

    IDSB also had the wisdom to plan a program of scientific instruction and understanding for those taking Arts A Levels, and modern historical studies for those studying the sciences. I, as a classicist, was introduced to Evolution and Genetics taught by the man himself, IDSB, the Cambridge Zoologist, and what an educator! As general knowledge what he taught became permanently invaluable – Gregor Mendel, the Galapagos Islands and their finches, natural selection, phenotypes 1 and 2, Watson and Crick, DNA and its double helix, gonads and zygotes…. Yep, I remember, in the following year an immensely successful vegetable marrow, the product of genetic manipulation, which self-seeded in our garden. My parents enthusiastically gave seedlings to their friends, ignoring my declaration, from information stated on the front of the original seed packet which illustrated what I had been taught, that the next generation would not breed true, would be duds. I was dismissed, my new scientific knowledge unheeded. Even though the recipients roundly declared that their marrows did not crop, I was still given no credit. It led me to question the value of an expensive education paid for by the very people who rejected its fruits. What was lacking? I suppose it was skills of presentation of which Margaret Thatcher was keenly conscious when her ‘Poll Tax’ was so agressively rejected. My failure is a paradox since IDSB was, and I imagine is, even more, a doyen, a fortiori, among exponents of the arts of persuasion. I could not have been sufficiently exposed to observation of his skills, but thank you, Headmaster, for all that you imparted to us. We were in the presence of a dimension of greatness.